Last month, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) touted a new study reporting that, as the press release headline had it, “State-Mandated Civics Test Policy Does Not Improve Youth Voter Turnout.” With more than a little evident glee, given the education school community’s hostility to anything that smacks of testing, the Penn State researchers reported that requiring high schoolers to pass a civics test didn’t lead to statewide increases in self-reported voting by 18 to 22-year-olds.
Now, there are several issues with this study, including the fact that boiling millions of students down to several dozen state-level aggregates made it unlikely that the researchers would find an impact. Indeed, one might wonder why the AERA chose to highlight the non-findings of a not-very-compelling study.
But let’s focus on the larger issue: The study fundamentally misconstrues the point of civics instruction. In American education today, it’s widely assumed that voting, advocacy, and “speaking out” are the ultimate aim of civic education.
There’s something odd about that premise. In a landscape pocked by hyperbolic social media, pro-terrorist theatrics on campus, and performative MAGA lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives, does it look like America’s problem is a lack of activism? Last week, Students for Justice in Palestine published an op-ed in Columbia University’s newspaper “celebrating” their having held “one of the largest campus protests” in Columbia’s history. The presumption is that a big protest is innately deserving of celebration. This is what follows from the premise that “activism is good,” even when it’s on behalf of rapists, kidnapers, and murderers.
As a one-time high school civics teacher, I wholly embrace the need to prepare students for democratic citizenship. But democratic government is about a lot more than activism and voting. It’s also about respect for rules, personal responsibility, patience, and a willingness to work with those who see things differently.
And those are the things that are getting neglected. After all, voter participation is at record highs. Impassioned activists and “small-money” donors are calling the shots in party primaries. The nation’s most visible lawmakers are those who have the least interest in the job of actually crafting laws. The U.S. citizenry is lacking not political participation but restraint, trust, knowledge, and respect for institutions and norms.
Democratic self-government is secured less by getting students to pull a lever (or mail in a ballot) than by helping them develop a proper respect for due process, free speech and a free press, canvassing boards that faithfully review vote tallies, election officials who resist political pressure, public agencies that maintain public trust, independent courts, responsible legislators, and limited executive authority. This is what civics needs to teach.
Today, civics education isn’t doing that. Teachers don’t even realize they’re supposed to teach those basic values. How do I know this? Because teachers themselves say so. The RAND Corporation has found that barely half of social studies teachers think it essential that students understand concepts like the separation of powers or checks and balances. In 2022, another RAND survey of K-12 teachers found that more thought a key aim of civics education is promoting environmental activism than “knowledge of social, political, and civic institutions.”
If teachers say they’re more concerned about environmental activism than civic institutions when asked about civics education, it’s a good bet they’re not spending a lot of time teaching why things like federalism and the separation of powers might be good—even if they make it tougher to impose one’s favored environmental policies.
The hard part of civics education isn’t the right to be heard but learning to be a responsible citizen. Voting isn’t actually a responsibility; rather, it’s an opportunity to tell elected officials, “This is what I want.” While that’s a vital part of democratic self-government, it’s also a fundamentally self-interested act. It’s really the easy part of citizenship.
The hard part is understanding why we don’t and shouldn’t always get our way, how anti-majoritarian arrangements like the Bill of Rights, the federal system, the separation of powers, and judicial review can protect each of us—even in those moments when they impede our ability to get what we want. Equally counterintuitive in a populist age is contemplating the downside of “democratic” practices like campaign finance reform (which have gutted the political parties), presidential primaries (which have strengthened the hand of ideologues), sunshine laws (which make it tougher for public officials to negotiate compromises), and televising Congress and courtrooms (which encourage grandstanding).
Indeed, the “participatory” ethos has contributed mightily to a politics in which reflexive, demagogic partisanship is increasingly the norm. Civic education in the American republic should help students grasp the role of institutions and norms in safeguarding self-government and checking illiberal impulses, right or left.
That’s why students need to study civics: so that they have an opportunity to learn how democratic institutions actually work, what it takes to defend them, and the demands of responsible citizenship. As for those education professors who think the point of civic education is “getting more 18-year-olds to vote”? They have, I fear, lost the plot.
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